People in Champaign county Illinois may have a uniqe problem in regards to the signal. The signal is all of the things described above but the MDICE is unique in some way. I bought a new PSR 600 and it wouldn't receive the signal. Gre said it was a CQPSK simulcast signal and difficult to decode. They asked for the return of the radio, bench tested it and said it tested good; sent me a new one and it won't intercept the talkgroups either. Both pick up state police which has the same system description. My pro 96 has no problems. I live about 3 miles from a tower. Took the radio to within a block of another tower and still couldn't decode the signals.
From reading the GRE web site, it didn't look like the PSR500/600 would do Astro, but if you're hearing ISP, then I must have missed something. Did you try taking the antenna off when you went to within a block of the tower? I saw another post that mentioned the receivers in the GRE's are very hot, so I'm wondering if the simulcast is overloading the front end.
Compatible Differential Offset Quadrature Phase Shift Keying, more commonly known as CQPSK (don't ask me why) is the basis for the Astro25 vocoder. The front end of the typical scanner is not all that selective, so in a simulcast system, such as MDICE, the CQPSK signal can be badly distorted and cause the radio to miss transmissions. I read post after post about the Uniden models missing less traffic than the Pro96 and I think this may be an indicator of the quality of the receivers used. If a user is closer to one of the simulcast tower sites, the chance of decoding the signal is greatly improved. Where a user will suffer the most is if they are located between towers and the radio 'sees' more than one signal at a time, leading to the inability to decode a clean signal.
StarCom21 in East Central Illinois is an Intelligent Repeat (IR) system, not simulcast, so the transmission should sound cleaner. The down side to IR for scanners being that unless a radio is set to the desired talk group you wish to monitor and is affiliated with a tower within your range, you will not hear the desired talk group transmissions. All transmissions are broadcast from all towers in a simulcast system, such as MDICE.